Retrato de Jerónimo de Cevallos

El Greco painted this in Toledo around 1609, near the end of his life, and the sitter was a neighbor of sorts. Jeronimo de Cevallos was a well-known legal scholar who wrote on natural law and often worked in the city, and he had helped and protected the painter's son Jorge Manuel. The whole picture is barely two feet tall, black on a plain dark ground, so that almost nothing competes with the face and that startling white ruff. The collar is wider than the man's own head, a stiff pleated disk with his gray beard spilling over the top of it. The eyes above it are sharp and a little wary. That plain dark background he had learned decades earlier in Venice, in the circle of the aging Titian, before he ever came to Spain.